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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Did Anonymous Sanction #OPFvcklentineDays?

A hacker that goes by the handle xCrotZ has been defacing various websites in protest of Valentine’s Day.

The act was discovered by security firm MalwareBytes and determined that the hacker is associated with hacktivist collective Anonymous because of the Anonymous Indonesia label as well as the #OPFvcklentineDays hashtag.

According to Robin Lutchansky of Lutchansky Communications, speaking for MalwareBytes, the defacement is a result of Muslim group that has called themselves #OP Fvcklentine Days to antagonize the celebration of Valentine’s Day as they deem it a pagan celebration.

Sites such as the Ottawa Catholic School Board, have been defaced, but it has been restored.

“Our main Board website was hacked. Our school websites, intranet and all student and staff information systems were not affected or compromised in any way. We hope to have the website up soon, we will be putting additional protective measures in place to ensure this does not happen again,” the school said.

Certainly also the use of the Twitter hashtag and “OP” to centralize the attack seems to suggest Anonymous in the hearts and minds of Internet users, however, it doesn’t seem likely that the hacktivist collective is involved.

Upon further investigation, Anonymous Indonesia, or Anonymous in general, did not launch an Anti-Valentine operation. In fact, if you do a quick search on Twitter, Anonymous Indonesia tweeted, “so where is my valentine chocolate? :P” If Anon_Indonesia launched this attack, I don’t think they would tweet anything Valentine-related and their Twitter feeds would all be about the Anti-Valentine movement.

In searching for #OPFvcklentineDays on Twitter, I noticed that there was one person who constantly updated sites that had been hacked.

Ahmad Zulham A.H @AhmadZulham_, at first look, appears to be a member of Anonymous but he can’t even spell Anonymous correctly. Also, his associates or as he/she calls them “My Best Friend,” Network Connections @Dickys_ and Alfit Rizky @alfitriski_, doesn’t seem to be connected to Anonymous. Zulham might be xCrotZ or someone who just keeps tab on hacking in general.

“It’s unlikely that Anonymous would be involved in a web defacement campaign that simply protests ‘Valentine’s Day’ without some sort of manifesto that speaks to either a moral or simply funny motivation,” says HackANGLE editor Kyt Dotson. “Also, the OP hashtag is used often as a hacker call to action–not just by Anonymous. Any group can use these calling cards. Add in the lack of collective action, calling cards distinct to Anonymous, or even common outlets picking up this #OP, and it’s highly unlikely that these hacks are anything but superficially related to the leaderless collective.”

From what I know about Anonymous, they fight for freedom. They launch attacks mostly on government website who curtail freedom of speech, knowledge, access to the Internet or freedom in general. They do not launch attacks that targets specific religions so I highly doubt that this Anti-Valentine operation was sanctioned by Anonymous.

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.